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POP-UP LUNCH BREAK – This Friday at SF Museum of Modern Art

On Friday, January 6th, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will transform into a neighborhood lunch break room to celebrate the final weeks of Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break, an exhibition that contemplates workers’ activities during their lunch breaks through film, photography, and writing. From 11:30 a.m. until 1:30 p.m. in The Schwab Room on the ground level, just off the museum’s Haas Atrium, Rice Paper Scissors—a Vietnamese pop-up café that has taken over warehouses and alleyways and energized the local dining scene—will join SFMOMA mainstays Blue Bottle Coffee Co. and Caffè Museo in selling special menus inspired by the exhibition. Throughout the event, Sharon Lockhart will participate via Skype, and contributors to the Lunch Break Times will be inviting visitors to discuss their various lunch break traditions and stories.

LUNCH BREAK – still, 2008. Sharon Lockhart

To create Lunch Break, the artist spent a year observing and engaging with blue-collar workers during their daily routines at Bath Iron Works, a naval shipyard in Bath, Maine. This allowed Lockhart to shed her outsider status and establish a level of intimacy and comfort with the workers. As the artist explains, “In all of my projects, I work hard to make the participants partners, so that the exchange is a personal one.” Lunch Break did not materialize without a struggle, however. Lockhart’s first attempts to enter the historic shipyard—the largest private employer in the state and owned by General Dynamics, the world’s fifth-largest defense contractor—were repeatedly rejected by the company. But, after spending time in Bath, she secured a meeting with the local union, which supported her work and successfully lobbied for her access to the factory.

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break, continues at SFMOMA through January 16th. This latest body of work by Sharon Lockhart, organized by Sabine Eckmann from the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, and overseen at SFMOMA by Curator of Media Arts Rudolf Frieling, will include a large-scale film installation, selected photographs, and a Bay Area edition of the artist’s free take-away newspaper, the Lunch Break Times. Through film, photography, and the print medium, Lockhart reflects on the presence of the individual in the context of industrial labor.

The film depicts the activities of the workers during their midday break at the shipyard. Extending ten minutes of footage into eighty minutes, Lockhart’s camera passes through a long corridor of the factory in extreme slow motion, tracking 1,200 feet of the hallway without panning, zooming, editing, or changing in tempo. The factory workers conduct their normal lunch break routines, some reading, some taking a nap, some in groups and others alone, talking, eating, drinking, and listening to the radio. The depicted space in Lockhart’s film is echoed in the architecture of the gallery installation at SFMOMA, a viewing space designed by Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena, and enhanced by a composition of industrial sounds collected from the factory space by filmmaker James Benning and composer Becky Allen.

“The extremely decelerated movement and the swelling soundtrack create anticipation for what is to come, while also establishing a sense of pause that allows the viewer to experience the film more like a photograph or tableau vivant,” Frieling says. “In Lunch Break we can examine details that would be too quickly passed over at the regular speed of film. The viewer’s attention and perception are constantly at work.”

The contemplation of the workers’ activities during their time off from production brings into view an everyday situation that foregrounds the presence of the individual. In contrast, the related photographic series emphasizes the actuality of individual objects, routines, and spaces: stickers on a lunchbox or the makeshift booths where workers sell snacks and various items.

Yet while Lunch Break focuses on day-to-day details, it reflects a much larger contemporary political and economic reality. The project’s attention to the local and to the rarely portrayed experience of the working class take on a particular social and political relevance in the context of global capitalism, war, and economic recession.

SFMOMA will offer visitors a free special-edition newspaper titled the Lunch Break Times, which Lockhart conceived as an artist project to further the dialogue of the Lunch Break exhibition. For this edition of the newspaper, an array of local writers, activists, and artists from Maine and the Bay Area will weigh in on various aspects of the history and current state of industrial labor.

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break – By Sabine Eckmann
American artist Sharon Lockhart is well known for her formally strict and conceptually precise films and photographs. Lunch Break, her newest solo exhibition, is the product of more than a year spent at the Bath Iron Works shipyard in Bath, Maine, observing and engaging with the shipbuilders during breaks from their daily routines. The resultant two film installations and three series of photographs present images that are devoid of sentiment yet deeply humane, intimate in their focus on everyday situations while reflective of broader global conditions through their historically grounded approach. The catalog includes over one hundred images in full color, essays by exhibition curator Sabine Eckmann and art historian Matthias Michalka, and an interview with Lockhart conducted by filmmaker James Benning. Click here to order on-line: Lunch Break Catalogue

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